Excited chatter fills the air as more than 25 children pour into the room at Olomopolo Media theater. A team of volunteers seats the children in groups around small tables. The first agenda of the day is to create soap bubbles. Soon …Continue reading
The billion tree solution
The word tsunami means devastation elsewhere in the world. But in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhunkhwa province, people are associating it with a flood of green. The provincial government has fought back climate change and deforestation by planting millions of saplings. The project is officially …Continue reading
The perils of drinking water
Safe drinking water is a basic human right. Goal six of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) states that universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water should be provided for all by the year 2030. However, in …Continue reading
Mixed signals – recent research in Pakistan’s mountain ranges
Although it is located on the far western side of the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKH) massif, Pakistan lies still at its center. It’s the only country with a share in all three mountain ranges and it lies at the bank of the Indus, a …Continue reading
The Emerging Healthtech Landscape
Sattar Khan suffered chronic pain in his legs for seven years. He consulted several doctors in his hometown of Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, who told him he needed a hip joint surgery but the facility was not available anywhere in …Continue reading
Pakistani researchers get patents for nano-antibiotics
Antibiotics are not always as effective as expected in treating bacterial infections. Conventional drug therapy shows that a range of factors affect their performance. These include irregular distribution of the drug in the body, low permeability of tissues, elevated hydrophobicity of biologically …Continue reading
Harnessing the Power of Business to Tackle Energy Poverty
Thousands of villages across Pakistan still lack access to piped gas and electricity supplied from the national grid. Based on government’s statistics, around three fourth of the households across the country are estimated to have no access to piped gas and about 30 …Continue reading
Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker
For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a …Continue reading
Locally Developed Simulator Promises to Train Surgery Students on MIS Procedures
Prohibitive cost of commercially available simulators has so far prevented their uptake by healthcare providers in the country. The traditional practice of imparting training of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) at medical colleges in Pakistan has been through apprenticeships. Junior doctors are placed …Continue reading
All You Need to Know About the Punjab IT Policy
The Punjab Information Technology (IT) policy draft is not just about IT. Rather, it aspires to be about governance in the age of IT. The Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) has held a public consultation on the draft and is now revising …Continue reading